Industrial Placement Student Review

My work was mostly clerical.
I wrote and processed invoices, helped suppliers with getting their technical information onboarded during a rough software transition, and picked up tasks my more established colleagues needed assistance with.

My summary sounds minor but the sorts of financial information and logistical processing I was given leave to oversee and learn about was humbling.
There were other aspects along with it - financial forecasting and price negotiations, but I wasn't involved much with that. It wasn't my skillset.

This was my first corporate job. Prior to that I've done nothing but blue collar work in a variety of industries.
Working in a fully abstracted task environment was very strange for me.
Learning to push towards resolutions when the task didn't feel possible,
Keeping track of 'invisible' tasks across days and weeks
Navigating labyrinthine circles of Who Knows Who to find a 5 minute fix for different process issues.
It was nothing like what I expected - and I feel much better equipped for if I find myself working in anything remotely similar.
And of course there's an interesting balance of social/cultural decorum across countries in business calls that took some picking up on.
My team was quite new and I don't feel the company itself has good onboarding methods for the various bits of software we needed access to.
Getting insight into the minutia of the functions was incredibly obscure.
Getting support from the company's technical teams (or finding the proper channels to get the proper help in the first place) was incredibly poor. My colleagues lose a lot of time on this, often to poor resolutions.
This remark does not reflect on my colleagues in Procurement - it was something we all suffered mutually.
This work wasn't very relevant to my degree or the type of work I've decided I'd like to be doing - but it was still worth the experience.
I didn't know where I wanted to go with my degree or how I wanted to develop myself going forward. This placement gave me the time and friction necessary to realize all of those things.

My teammates were really helpful in getting me started - I enjoyed the work I did with them.

My Unilever colleagues were lovely.
For the most part (at least at the level of work I occupied) things were calm even amid turbulence.
The people I saw occasionally at the PSL office were among the friendliest and welcoming peers I've had the pleasure of interacting with.

It was a necessary experience for my life that gave me very necessary insights I didn't expect to find.
I didn't appreciate how abominable the support for various technical problems was though.
Asking 'Una' (rebranded copilot) wasn't often useful for me, and Copilot just makes things up.
The route to getting agents for specific software was muddied at best.
Typically I got agents who were assigned to a different software entirely, and I'd be given emails to teams who never responded.
It took me 5 months to find the right people who were both knowledgeable and timely with SAP related issues.
I'd have accesses revoked without warning and applications / petitions to keep those accesses from being needlessly revoked entirely ignored.
The outsourcing this company has done for so much of its workflow has led to a truly poor experience for many of my colleagues.
Still I met great people, learned what I needed for myself, and have used those insights to find good opportunities from here.
So I'm grateful for the opportunity I had with Unilever.

Yes